3 Customer Engagement ‘Treats’ This Halloween

The leaves are changing color. Pumpkin-spiced lattes are still flying out of coffee shops. (American) football is almost halfway through the season. And, Halloween is here (and therefore we get to write a Halloween themed blog). 

Let’s be honest, resolving a customer service issue is never fun. And that’s being kind. We’ve all had bad interactions with brands—while you might occasionally have a positive one, unfortunately, that’s rarely the rule. You’re more likely to end up stuck on the phone listening to hold music, occasionally interrupted by a recording that reassures you that “your call is important to us” and “your patience is appreciated.”

So, what have consumers done to avoid being put on hold? We started reaching out over digital engagement channels on a more frequent basis. In fact, 56 percent of customers under the age of 45 now prefer to ask questions through a digital engagement channel vs. traditional one.

What’s the customer engagement trick?

To meet these changing consumer preferences, many brands gravitate toward an omnichannel customer experience strategy. This results in organizations trying to serve their customers on every possible channel: WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, email, live chat, their website—the list goes on.

But just deploying omnichannel customer engagement to check the boxes is an incomplete approach and can lead to disjointed customer experiences.

Organizations need a new approach to help manage this growing customer preference for digital channels—one that allows them to meet increasing customer expectations and interactions—and makes it possible for brands to engage in a truly seamless way. But to do this, brands need to treat customer conversations over digital channels as continuous engagements vs. single interactions.

What’s the treat?

Adding more channels doesn’t need to be scary. Done correctly, brands can deliver nothing but treats this Halloween. Here are the three steps you can take to provide a seamless, reliable customer experience in digital self-service channels.

• Use a single agent UI to orchestrate customer engagement: When adding new customer service channels, it’s common to inadvertently create scary “channel workforce silos,” leading to disjointed support experiences. You need to go beyond simple call routing by connecting related interactions across all digital channels, for a seamless customer—and employee—experience. This allows staff to elevate individual customer interactions into connected engagements, even if the customer journey spans various touchpoints and channels. This strategy also makes any agent the right agent while also increasing contact center flexibility and capacity to handle an omnichannel approach to customer experience management.

• Scale customer engagement with automation: Conversational AI-ready digital platforms that combine both intelligent automation and agent-assisted service result in fewer inquiries needing a human response. Used as a frontline triage, bots can resolve repetitive, simple issues, allowing highly skilled agents to handle high-value interactions. This means that although you enable customer conversations over more channels, volumes are kept at a manageable level through service bots with a human agent just a handoff away.

• Use predictive analytics that suggest the next best action: Organizations capture an overwhelming volume of customer engagement data across customer touchpoints, and so adding more digital channels only increases the amount of data collected. Therefore, you need the ability to deliver a 360-degree view of customer and employee experiences by measuring them across a variety of touchpoints—and then predicting the best, most effective ways to enhance them by providing outcomes and information germane to that individual customer’s needs. Armed with this insight, you can make better, more informed decisions that can impact revenue, loyalty, retention, and competitive advantage.

Building these 3 treats into your omnichannel customer engagement strategy will enable you to move from disconnected interactions (the trick) to seamless customer journeys (the treat).

Where to begin? With Verint.

It’s time for companies to take a smarter, more holistic approach to delivering an omnichannel customer engagement strategy. With Channel Automation from Verint, you can consolidate and guide all customer conversations, channels, and history from a single agent interface to empower your workforce and deliver exceptional digital-first experiences with game-changing business results.

Hear from Verint customers about how they and their customers are benefiting from seamlessly connecting digital and human channels. Download the new commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Verint: The Total Economic Impact of Verint Digital-First Engagement.